From the 1880s to the late 1960s, a period that ranges from the ascendancy of white supremacy to the Black Power movement, the psychology and culture of people of African descent in America has been viewed primarily through the prisms of deviance or deficits. Within the biological paradigm in the late nineteenth century, “race psychology,” as it was sometimes referred to, was said to govern the behavior of all races. A product of biology, the behavior of African Americans was understood to tend toward the maladjusted and antisocial. During the Progressive era, social, as well as biological, explanations began to appear, challenging those who would reduce black behavior to innate traits. The cultural paradigm reached ascendancy in the 1930s, but with it came no decisive relief from the notion that black personality was problematic—it remained the interpretation stalking the research of yet another generation. In the post-World War II era, the racial paradigm had been abandoned, but the view of black as pathological only increased—indeed, culture proved more deleterious than biology in engendering pathology.